


fresh static snow

by taakofromtaz (AmazingSuperiority)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Finale, This hasn't been beta'd, Wow this got sad, but now it's not, first chapter is taako's pov, lup cries, second chapter is lup's pov, taako dissociates, this was gonna be a oneshot, twin angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 04:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12856755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmazingSuperiority/pseuds/taakofromtaz
Summary: He didn’t even know her name, yet he felt sorry for her.(aka Taako forgets Lup, again, and she doesn’t know how to bring him back. He is her heart, but she is also his. What kind of life is it to live without your heart?)





	1. though i'll never know your name

**Author's Note:**

> first taz fic and it feels so good. this fandom is good. i like it here lol. (finally posting a fic after reading a million of them lol gotta turn some of my thousands of wips into finished products lol)
> 
> this fic was the result of a dialogue prompt lol
> 
> title comes from the song "fresh static snow" by porter robinson
> 
> thanks to the taz fic writers discord for the prompt and the encouragement!

When Taako wakes up, he doesn’t recognize where he is. He’s lying in a bed, a real bed with real pillows and blankets and sheets, in a room by himself. The room, he notices once he sits up and looks around, is a lot nicer than the shitty inns he’s used to crashing in for the night and shows more signs of being lived in than any place he’s ever slept before. There’s clothes scattered haphazardly around the room, books stacked on the dresser and end tables, jewelry dangling from every available corner.

The room looks wonderful but frighteningly unfamiliar.

Taako debates going back to sleep and risking the wrath of whoever it is that owns this place, but the fear of getting his ass kicked while he can’t defend himself is more terrifying, so he pushes the sheets back and forces himself out of bed. Judging by his clothes, soft shorts and a crop top, he had willing stayed here the night before, so hopefully it means he was invited. If he was invited, it means he should be able to get out of here before he becomes _un_ invited.

He scours the room for the needed clothing and dresses quickly. The clothes he finds are only somewhat practical and definitely flashier than anything he’s used to wearing, but they fit perfectly and they make him look _damn_ good. (Whoever owns these clothes must be rich as fuck—these clothes are fucking _fine_.) He considers shoving handfuls of necklaces and rings in his pockets, maybe make a quick buck, but he’s obviously here on _someone’s_ good graces and hell, maybe they’ll invite him back.

(It’s unlikely, seeing as he doesn’t know where he is, but he wants to keep the possibility open. He likes the idea of having a place to come back to when things get rough, someone willing to take him in when he’s down on his luck. He hasn’t had that since his aunt. It’s selfish, he thinks, but he wants to have that again.)

He doesn’t see anything familiar in this room and he just hopes that his stuff is still with his wagon—and that the wagon is still waiting for him, outside of wherever this place is. Someone’s house maybe?

He bites his lip and gives himself a shake. Whatever, it’s not important. Current mission? Escape this kickass room and get back on the road.

He takes the few steps around the bed to the door and reaches for the handle, only to dodge back a few steps as the door flies open.

As Taako takes a moment to compose himself from the shock, a woman’s voice says, “Koko! You’re up already!” He blinks and looks into the face of another elf, one he can only assume is about his age. “Help me with breakfast?”

Taako stares at her for a long minute, trying his best to take in her features. One second he catches green eyes, the next they’re silver. He sees bright red lips and freckles and… Her features are swimming, jumbling up and disconnecting like her face is a soup instead of something solid. The longer he stands there staring at her, trying to make sense of her, the more concerned she starts to look. He may not be able to focus on much of her but the flashes he can understand make it obvious.

“Taako…?” she hesitantly asks, one hand reaching out for him.

He takes a half step back and stares at it, stares at the flaking red on her ends of her fingers, transfixed, the polish on her blunt nails chipped and cracked. Her fingers are long and thin—like his—and he has the strange urge to grab her hand and lace their fingers together. He shakes the thought away. She probably already thinks he’s an idiot because he can’t get his eyes to focus or his mouth to speak.

“Koko, baby, look at me,” she begs, pleads, fingers curling as she withdraws her hand. He traces up the line of her arm with his eyes and notices the tension in her shoulders. Her hair is cropped fairly short but spills partly over one shoulder, bright, cherry red. Red like fire.

“Your face is hard to look at,” he finally says after a few too many seconds of staring at her hair. It’s shaved on one side, leaving soft fuzz thick enough to cover her scalp but short enough to not require any maintenance. The very ends, her roots, are a gentle blonde. “I like your hair,” he tells her, eager to soothe her discomfort for reasons beyond his immediate understanding.

“Th-thank you,” she says, voice quiet. She curls in on herself and he tries to look at her face again. She looks sad. It’s funny; he doesn’t even know her name, yet he feels sorry for her.

“What’s wrong?” he hears himself asking around a growing feeling of static in his ears. It’s as if his head is full of cotton and the ground is falling out from beneath their feet. He can almost see himself from the outside, the way he knows his ears are parallel to the ground, a mirror of hers, the defensive hunch he has to his back, the way his feet are angled so he can run if he has to. She’s clutching the door as if it’s the only way to hold herself up.

“Taako,” she says again, a certain wet quality to her voice. “Taako, Koko, baby.” She sniffles and swipes at her eyes with one hand. He stares at her nails for a second time. It’s easier to look at. “Can you recognize me?”

“No,” he tells her, he thinks. He feels far away right now, like he isn’t real, or maybe she isn’t real, but it doesn’t matter because real or not he wants to answer. “Sorry,” he adds, because it feels like the right thing to do.

She gives a small sob and nods, holding her hands out to him. He watches them intently. “Can you come with me? Please?”

He sees his arm raise and his hand grasp hers, but he doesn’t feel it. His feet are numb as she pulls him away from the bedroom and down a long hallway to a living room with several couches. He wants to ask why she needs so many couches, but his tongue is thick and words are hard. It takes a minute, but he puts all of his effort into saying, “What’s wrong?” again.

She tries to smile at him and he squints until he can see the curve of her red lips, and he smiles back. It feels fake and wrong, so he stops. Takes a deep breath. Looks back at their joined hands again. Frees one to run fingers over the biggest chips in the red polish. Red, red, red.

The world tilts as she sits him down on the longest couch. She slides her hands up his arms and he lets her, stares blankly at her lap as he tries to remember what he was doing before she walked in. Her hands stop on his face and his eyes fall shut. He’s getting a headache in the middle of his forehead. He hasn’t gotten one in a while. He forgot how much they hurt.

“Koko, can you hear me?” she says, voice soft like a crackling flame. “It’s me, Lup.” His brow furrows and he feels soft lips kiss at the lines that form there. “I’m Lup. It’s me. Your sister. Your twin sister, remember?”

He shakes his head, gently, and she sighs. Her hands move to the back of his head and she pulls him closer, tugs him into a hug. He lets himself be moved by her. She looked so sad in the bedroom and he broke his heart. He just wants her to be happy and smiling again.

“It’s okay baby, it’s okay.” She sounds like the mother he never had. The mother… _they_ never had? She—Lup—is his sister, his twin. She shouldn’t have to baby him like this. He should move. He should get up. He should—but he stays. He stays and lets her hug him while she cries in his hair and he pretends not to notice. His eyes are still closed. His head really hurts.

“What’s wrong?” he says, _again_ , because she still hasn’t answered him. She sniffs once, loud and harsh and he moves a hand from where it fell into his lap and rests it against her back. He follows his instinct and rubs it in soothing circles between her shoulder blades. She gives a single heaving sob and tightens her hold.

“Taako, babe, I love you. I just… I need you to know that,” she tells him, and loosens her hold, lets him move back but keeps him in arm’s reach, hands on his shoulders, fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

Taako opens his eyes and looks at Lup, forces his eyes to focus on hers, on the mismatched colors of silver and green, on the curve of her nose and the freckles dusting her cheeks, on the line of her jaw, on her red, red lips. He wants to see her, wants to see his sister, his twin, but all he sees is static. “I’m sorry,” falls from his mouth like hot iron, drops heavily between them, sits in the space between them, pushes them apart even as Lup falls forward, sobbing into his chest while he resumes rubbing circles between her shoulders.

He doesn’t remember her. He doesn’t remember her and he hates it. He hates the way she sobs into his chest, the desperate way she clings to him, the pain he can hear in her voice. He hates that he can’t think straight when it comes to her, that he can see the details of her face but can’t combine them in his head, that he doesn’t know what to do when she hurts so much because of him.

Her cries eventually come to a stop. At some point he’d bowed his head and buries his head into her hair. She smells like campfires and cinnamon. “I don’t know what to do,” she murmurs, voice raw and quiet. “You should still remember me.” Her arms are wrapped around his waist and she squeezes him tightly. He feels like that should make him nervous but it doesn’t.

Taako has to stop himself from apologizing again. Instead, he sighs through his head and moves his hand to run fingers through her fire red hair. “My head hurts. Right behind my eyes. There’s… there’s static in my ears and nothing feels real except for this.” He tilts his head up and stares vacantly at the ceiling. “I wanted to leave when I got up but I don’t remember why.”

Lup turns her liquid face towards him. “That’s your room,” she tells him. “This is our house and that’s your room. You live here. _We_ live here. We don’t have to run anymore, Koko. This is our home. The world is safe and we have a family and _we’re safe_.” She moves slightly closer, less laying in his lap and more leaning against him.

He shifts them around until he can lay his head on her shoulder. She’s a few inches taller than him. He fits perfectly against her and all the tension leaves his body as she surrounds him in her embrace. She’s warm, almost toasty, and he thinks that she feels like home. “What about my show?” he asks, voice more solid than it’s been since he woke up.

“We’ve lived here for a year now, baby.” She disentangles a hand to rub his shoulders. “You haven’t had a show for over five years.”

“Oh,” he says, because that’s all he can think to say. His show is gone but he has a home and a sister and a family? His head hurts and he feels so, so tired. He thinks he should be afraid to sleep because he doesn’t know her—she said she’s his sister but how can he know that for sure?—but the act of trying to make sense of her face is exhausting and he just wants to stay right here. He loops his arms around her waist, rests them on her hips, tucks his nose into her collarbone. “You’re warm. I don’t wanna leave.”

She strokes his hair, long and loose and blond—the same as her short roots—and he sighs. “You don’t have to go anywhere. Not if you don’t want to.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles, eyes sliding shut, ears drooping, grip slacking. She nods against him, unable to speak past the lump in her throat.

Lup must've fallen asleep there on the couch, curled protectively around her brother, because when she opens her eyes, he's gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna have a solid end here but i decided to make it two chapters apparently


	2. i'll cry for you the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS SUPER UN-BETA'D!!!! i'll proof it later i just want this posted,
> 
> again, the titles are from "fresh static snow" by porter robinson

Sometimes Lup forgets how long Taako spent without her. Realistically, it was only a little over ten years, but the passage of time is strange and inconsistent when you’re surrounded by nothing but black curtains and your own thoughts. She’s not even sure she was aware of herself for some of her time alone, and as soon as her brother found her, she was able to regain even more of herself.

It was awful and horrifying (and terrifying) and something she would never wish on another living soul, but at least in her isolation she was able to remind herself that she had family waiting for her: a brother that made her entire world brighter, the love of her life, their assorted collection of brothers and sisters and doofy dads that she couldn’t imagine living without.

She can’t imagine spending those ten years utterly convinced that she never had anyone, that she is and always had been alone, that no one cared enough about her to watch her back or keep her safe or help her survive. Before the end of the world, when she was still trapped in her velvet prison, she could see how shattered her brother was, could see how the parts of him barely fit together, jagged pieces broken to so they’d slot together roughly.

She thought that was behind them. She thought that he’d never be like that again. She was so sure they’d be able to fix those broken pieces and fill in the gaps where things went missing and help him be the person he was before Lup ever left him to begin with. All of that was Before.

Today is a Bad Day for Taako.

They’ve all had their share of Bad Days, days so horrible and terrifying that just getting out of bed is struggle. Lup’s seen plenty of Taako’s Bad Days, days where he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps and every waking moment is spent staring blankly ahead or overthinking or sometimes even crying heartbreaking, end of the world sobs that stab deep into her heart and latch on like fish hooks. Lup’s always tried to be there for her brother on these Bad Days, always tried to be there to hold him and calm his fears and wipe his tears. Her poor, emotionally vulnerable brother, prone to sadness and introspection and self-deprecation and fear.

Today is a Bad Day for Taako and Lup, for the first time in their lives, doesn’t know how to fix it.

He doesn’t remember her. Again. Anymore. Taako has forgotten Lup and lost several of the last few years and he’s gotten lost inside of his own head and fabricated memories and personalities and Lup is devastated. She hates that this has happened but what she hates even more is that she’s at a total loss as to what to do.

And now he’s gone.

Lup jolts off the couch, eyes wide and heart beating a staccato in her chest. “Taako?” she calls out, glancing around the living room. Nothing looks different than it did earlier, nothing out of place, no obvious signs of her brother leaving. She wonders, briefly, how he managed to pry himself out of her hold without waking her, and she shakes her head to banish the thought. Not important right now.

She pricks her ears up, listening closely for any signs of him, and quietly steps away from the couch and towards the kitchen. She doubts she’ll find him there—he’s been avoiding being alone in the kitchen ever since they moved in—but she decides to check anyway. (Maybe he will be there, she tells herself, trying to calm her racing thoughts. He still thinks he has a show. Maybe he’ll try to cook again.)

The kitchen is big and clean and new and empty. This room looks as untouched as the living room which is as relieving as it is worrying. This new Taako, the one that lived ten years without, that thinks he grew up alone, that suffered abuse she hasn’t begun to scratch the surface of—she doesn’t know him like she used to and it kills her. She doesn’t know where this new Taako would go to hide, to get away.

The old Taako would have run off to the kitchen for a session of stress cooking or baking. The old Taako would make abhorrent amounts of food and mutter nonsense to himself if he were on the verge of a panic attack. He would move and grab and cook and he was loud and active and showy, hiding his feelings behind a lot talk and flashy magic. This new Taako is quiet and sullen and he makes himself small, flinches at loud voices and flying hands, avoids the kitchen like a venomous snake, clutches his ears and chews on his lips.

She doesn’t know where the old Taako meets the new Taako and she can’t reconcile the two together. To be fair, though, she doesn’t think he can either.

This whole thing they’ve had going this past year has been ridiculously hard on him. He won’t admit it, won’t even begin to talk about it, but she can see it in the slump of his shoulders, in the way he tries to smile even when she knows he doesn’t want to, in the way he throws himself into his new endeavors and relationships and business deals. He’s hiding behind so many personas at so many times of the day that she’s not sure if she’s even seen the real Taako yet.

What she saw today, earlier on the couch? That may have been the realest he’s been in years. And he probably doesn’t even realize it.

Lup pulls to a stop, there in the kitchen, eyes staring blankly ahead. The gears in her head keep turning, roll her thought over and over, and she turns on her heel and marches back to his bedroom, keeping her footsteps light enough so it doesn’t sound like stomping, but heavy enough so that he can hear her coming.

She focuses her ears on his bedroom, tries to pick up any unusual sounds. They’re the only ones here today, so unless Barry or Kravitz show up with no warning, Lup will know whenever Taako makes a sound. She reaches his room and pauses, reaching out and putting her hand on his door. It’s shut, which is initially a good sign because it was open before, but it also makes her worry because she doesn’t know what’s on the other side.

“Taako?” she asks, trying to keep her voice soft while also audible through the door. “It’s me, Lup. Can I come in?”

She lays an ear flat against the door and waits. There’s a muffle sniffle, so quiet she’s not sure she would have heard it if she’d stood back, and then he’s saying, “Door’s open.” His voice is utterly wrecked and she tries to keep the frown off her face as she twists the handle and steps inside the room.

It’s darker than she expected—the curtains and blinds are drawn tightly closed—but darkvision renders that sort of problem unimportant. She latches the door behind her and leans back as she surveys the room. All the clothes have been picked through—probably from earlier, when he woke up in an unfamiliar place wearing nothing but sleeping clothes—and the bed is empty of its sheets and blankets.

She knows her brother is here; she heard him. So where…? This room, she remembers, has a walk in closet. It’s the second biggest room in the house, following the master suite, and when she and Barry bought the house—because it had been something the two of them talked about, dreamed about, sometimes with Taako, other times without—they both knew that the three of them would live together. Barry and Lup would get the master suite, having couples seniority, and Taako would take the next best thing. (Really, the only difference between the two rooms is the size of the windows, and Taako doesn’t particularly care either way.)

(This house is big enough for their entire ragtag family, they made sure of it. It’s multiple stories high and boasts several bedrooms—some of them being bonus rooms converted to bedrooms by Magnus himself—but it’s the only thing that Lup and Barry had really, truly wanted after over was over and the Hunger was finally gone.)

Lup finds Taako in the darkest corner of the closet, wrapped tightly in his nest of blankets, hands clenched painfully around his ears. Lup winces at the sight and she wants to yank his hands away, but she realizes she needs to be tactful. One wrong move and he might lose whatever faith she’s managed to gain.

“Taako? You in there, sweetie?” She watches his face to gauge his reaction, but either he’s gotten better at making his face carefully blank, she’s gotten rusty, or he’s dissociating so hard right now she’ll be lucky if he knows his _own_ name.

“Not really,” he says, and fuck, he sounds so small and lost. She hates it, hates everything about this, but what the fuck can she do? She left, she wasn’t there for him, she wasn’t there when he forgot about her the first time. By the time they could talk again, actually talk with words back and forth and not scorched cryptically on a wall, he already remembered her and knew who she is. She doesn’t know how to deal with this Taako. She’s never had to.

Lup crouches down to his level and tilts her head to look up into his face. His eyes are squeezed shut and there are wet track lines running down his face and she has to take a deep breath to keep from crying too. “Hey,” she says, voice little more than a breath. “Can I come in?” She points at the blankets and pinches a loose end between two fingers.

Taako peels his eyes open and stares down at where she grabbed the blanket. It takes him a minute, but eventually he nods and takes a hand from his ears to open his cocoon up to her. She offers him a smile and takes over positioning herself under the blankets with him, wrapping them both up as tight as she can before taking his hands in hers.

“Don’t do that,” she gently tells him, inspecting the ear closest to her. She can see the individual marks of each of his fingers and it makes her sick. He never did this before, not when they were together. She brushes his ears with a featherlight touch and he flinches, hard, and tugs at his hands where they’re both held in one of hers. “Sorry, babe, I won’t do it again.” She has to hold her breath for several counts to calm down.

“My head hurts.” His voice is flat and dull hoarse.

She cards a hand through his hair. “Still?” He nods. She presses a kiss to his temple. “I could get you some pain killers?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t leave.” He shifts his hands out of her grip to hold her instead. “Stay here. Help me remember. He finally, _finally_ , looks away from their hands and into her face. Just like every other time he’s tried to look at her today, his eyes don’t focus on her face, irises bouncing around from place to place. _“Your face is hard to look at,”_ he told her earlier. They two of them look so much alike—what did he see when he looked in the mirror?

Lup takes a deep breath, holds in, and lets it out slowly. “Okay,” she says, and presses close to him, pins him between her body and the wall. He pushes back, ever so slightly, and she knows that it means he’s trusting her. For right now, that’s all she can hope for.

She spends the next few hours telling her brother every single interesting thing about the two of them that she can remember, every important life event, both good and bad, and regaling him with tales of the adventures they’d all gotten up to during their one hundred years aboard the Starblaster.

She tactfully skips over the ten years that follow, and tells him instead of his recent accomplishments; the plans to renew his show, rebranded as “Sizzle it Up with Taako and Lup” (she’s excited to do this with him, this thing that he used to do and loved so much he wants to do it again), his magic school, his friendship with Ren and her subsequent adoption by the two of them.

Lup tells Taako about Angus McDonald, his beautiful magic boy, about how whip smart he is, how kind and compassionate he is, how he’s only twelve years old with his whole life ahead of him yet he’s already accomplished so much. She talks about him and she smiles and talks until he smiles too.

Lup tells Taako about Kravitz and their meeting and their first date that she almost ruined. Then she has to tell Taako about _how_ she ruined it, about being a lich, about being trapped in an umbrella for a long, long time. She only meant to skim the top, to drop the fact and move on, but Taako squeezes her hand, tries to catch her eye, says, “Tell me about it,” and so she does.

She tells him about how, for a long time, she wasn’t aware of anything. How she slowly woke up, and regained sight and sound and her sense of self. She describes the black curtains, mumbles about her fear and anger and frustration, haltingly expresses how much she hated it there and the loss of her family and how _lost_ she felt until he found her again. She tells him about how she was there for him, however she could be, in his adventures and how he eventually freed her.

Eventually, she runs out of things to say and falls silent. The closet makes the sudden absence of words feel heavy and muted and it makes her ears ring. Even since getting out of the staff, she’s hated total silence. Usually she’s fine—birds will chirp outside or the sound of Barry sleeping beside her keeps her calm—but this… This is different.

Her distress must’ve shown on her face because the next thing she knows, Taako is wrapping her in a hug and pressing his face close to hers, his breath brushing her ears. “It’s okay, Lulu. It’s going to be okay.”

“K-Koko?” She wants him to be better now. She wants him to remember, to be the brother she might not know anymore but she’s trying to relearn. “Are you—is it—do you remember me?”

He doesn’t answer for a minute and only the constant sweep of his exhales across her skin keep her grounded. “Not completely,” he says, breaking her heart just a little more, “but I’m getting there.”

“I know I’ve said this before but I need to say it again,” Lup says, cupping his face in her hands and looking into his eyes, one green and one silver and the opposite of hers. “Taako, _you are my heart_. No matter what happens, whether you remember me or not, you’re the one that makes my entire world keep turning.”

She can see the moment he starts crying, but she doesn’t say anything, just rubs them away with her thumbs. “You’re mine, too,” he tells her wrapping his fingers around her wrists. “When I didn’t know you, I thought I grew up alone. It was awful, Lulu. I don’t want to have grown up with you. It fucking _sucked_.”

Lup presses a kiss to his forehead and holds him there. “I know, babe, I know.” What kind of life would it be to live without your heart? She can’t even fathom the idea and yet her brother lived it.

Taako’s breath hitches and he forces himself to calm, taking deep breaths. “Lup, I hate this. I don’t want to forget about you again. I thought this was never going to happen again.” He tightens his grip. “It felt like I was trapped in my own fucking head. I didn’t know where I was or who you were or what was happening.” He’s trying not to cry again. She knows him well enough to know that he’s scared shitless, terrified of losing her and himself so suddenly and easily.

“If it does,” she says, hoping that it never will (and it does, eventually, but she’s better prepared in the future), “then I’ll be right there with you. We’re a part of each other. We’re a _team._ You don’t have to face this alone. Never again.”

Taako nods and sighs and closes his eyes. He leans into her and she can feel him shaking. “I love you, Lulu,” he whispers against her chest, listening to the beat of her heart.

“I love you, too.” Lup smiles and brushes her hands through his hair. “Now let’s go make some food. I’m starving.”

He pulls back and gives her a grin. Things might not be okay, not yet, but they will be. Eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is done. i can't believe it yall i did it :)

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are much appreciated!!! (feel free to just scream at me, and if words are hard, keysmashes work too lol) i hope i can continue to post some of the taz things i've written in the future. i have a couple baller aus in the works and im real excited to share them :0


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